Jules Maigret | fictional character | Britannica.com fictional character Edmond Dantès Jules Maigret, fictional character, an unassuming, compassionate, and streetwise Parisian police commissioner who is the protagonist of more than 80 novels by Georges Simenon . Simenon’s books featuring Inspector Maigret include Pietr-le-Letton (1931; The Case of Peter the Lett), Le Chien jaune (1931; “The Yellow Dog,” Eng. trans. A Face for a Clue), Le Fou de Bergerac (1932; The Madman of Bergerac), Un Noël de Maigret (1951; Maigret’s Christmas), Maigret aux assises (1960; Maigret in Court), and Maigret et Monsieur Charles (1972). Learn More in these related articles: 1 Reference found in Britannica Articles Assorted Reference novels of Simenon (in Georges Simenon ) External Links Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. MEDIA FOR: You have successfully emailed this. Error when sending the email. Try again later.

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Close Date Published: September 11, 2015 URL: Access Date: January 08, 2017 Share Order of Inspector Maigret Books - OrderOfBooks.com Home | Characters | Authors Order of Inspector Maigret Books Inspector (or Commissaire) Jules Maigret is the lead character in a series of detective fiction novels by Belgian author Georges Simenon . Maigret is a French detective who works for the Paris Brigade Criminelle. He is best known for smoking his pipe, his detective style of mixing intuition with method and his love of alcohol. While the character is based in France, he also has ended up working in Belgium, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Holland and the USA. The series has been adapted into several television and radio adaptations in several different languages. Jules Maigret made his debut in the novel The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, which was also published as The Case of Peter the Lett and Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. Published in 1931 in French, the original French title of the novel was Pietr-le-Letton.

The final novel in the series was Maigret and Monsieur Charles, published in 1972, and was the 75th book in the series.

Below is a list of Georges Simenon’s Jules Maigret books in order of when they were first released in French: Publication Order of Inspector Maigret Books The Strange Case of Peter the Lett (1931) The Crime at Lock 14 (1931) Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets (1931) A Face for a Clue (1931) Maigret and the Tavern by the Seine (1932) Maigret and the Death of a Harbour Master (1932) Maigret and the Hotel Majestic (1942) Maigret and the Toy Village (1944) Maigret in New York's Underworld (1946) Maigret and the Old Lady (1950) Maigret and the Burglar's Wife (1951) Maigret and the Man on the Bench (1953) Maigret and the Young Girl (1954) Maigret and the Calame Report (1954) Maigret and the Headless Corpse (1955) Maigret and the Reluctant

 Witnesses (1958) Maigret and the Lazy Burglar (1961) Maigret and the Black Sheep (1961) Maigret and the Saturday Caller (1962) Maigret and the Nahour Case (1966) Maigret and the Wine Merchant (1969) Publication Order of Inspector Maigret Collections Maigret's Pipe: Seventeen Stories Kurt Wallander Notes: The Strange Case of Peter the Lett was also published as The Case of Peter the Lett and Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett.

The Crime at Lock 14 was also titled Maigret Meets a Milord and Lock 14. The Death of Monsieur Gallet was also published as Maigret Stonewalled. The Crime of Inspector Maigret was also published as Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets. A Battle of Nerves was also published as Maigret’s War of Nerves and A Man’s Head. A Face for a Clue was also published as Maigret and the Concarneau Murders, Maigret and the Yellow Dog and as The Yellow Dog. A Crime in Holland was also published as Maigret in Holland. The Sailor’s Rendezvous was also published as Maigret Answers a Plea. Maigret at the Gai Moulin was also published as At the Gai Moulin. Maigret and the Tavern by the Seine was also published as Guinguette by the Seine, Maigret to the Rescue, A Spot by the Seine and The Bar on the Seine. Maigret Mystified was also published as The Shadow in the Courtyard.

Maigret and the Countess was also published as The Saint-Fiacre Affair, Maigret Goes Home and Maigret on Home Ground. Maigret and the Flemish Shop was also titled as The Flemish Shop. Death of a Harbour Master was also published under the title of Maigret and the Death of a Harbor Master. Liberty Bar was also published as Maigret on the Riviera. The Lock at Charenton was also published as Maigret Sits It Out and Lock No. 1. Maigret and the Hotel Majestic is also titled The Hotel Majestic. To Any Lengths was also published as Maigret and the Fortuneteller. Maigret’s Rival was also published as Inspector Cadaver. Maigret in New York was also published as Maigret in New York’s Underworld. A Summer Holiday was also published as No Vacation for Maigret and Maigret on Holiday. Maigret’s Dead Man was also published as Maigret’s Special Murder. My Friend Maigret was also published under the title of The Methods of Maigret.

Madame Maigret’s Own Case was also published as Madame Maigret’s Friend and The Friend of Madame Maigret. Maigret and the Strangled Stripper was also published as Maigret in Montmartre. Maigret Takes a Room was also published as Maigret Rents a Room. Inspector Maigret and the Killers was also published as Maigret and the Gangsters. Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard was also published as Maigret and the Man on the Bench and The Man on the Boulevard. Inspector Maigret and the Dead Girl was also published as Maigret and the Young Girl. Maigret and the Minister was also published under the title Maigret and the Calame Report. Maigret’s Little Joke was also published as None of Maigret’s Business. Maigret and the Lazy Burglar was also published as Maigret and the Idle Burglar. Maigret and the Dosser was also published as Maigret and the Bum. Maigret and the Ghost was also titled Maigret and the Apparition. The Patience of Maigret was also titled Maigret Bides His Time.

Maigret’s Pickpocket was also published as Maigret and the Pickpocket. Maigret Takes the Waters was re-titled Maigret in Vichy. Maigret and the Flea was also published as Maigret and the Informer. Maigret series by Georges Simenon 84 works, 83 primary works Inspector Maigret, a police inspector in Paris, France, and Madame Maigret, his wife. Jules Amedée François Maigret, simply Jules Maigret or Maigret to most people, including his wife, is a fictional French police detective, actually a commissaire or commissioner of the Paris "Brigade Criminelle" (Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris), created by writer Georges Simenon. 75 novels and 28 short stories about Maigret were published between 1931 and 1972, starting with Pietr-le-Letton (Pi Inspector Maigret, a police inspector in Paris, France, and Madame Maigret, his wife.

Jules Amedée François Maigret, simply Jules Maigret or Maigret to most people, including his wife, is a fictional French police detective, actually a commissaire or commissioner of the Paris "Brigade Criminelle" (Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris), created by writer Georges Simenon. 75 novels and 28 short stories about Maigret were published between 1931 and 1972, starting with Pietr-le-Letton (Pietr the Lett) and concluding with Maigret et Monsieur Charles. The Maigret stories were also adapted for television and radio. ...more Simenon's Inspector Maigret 36 Quai des Orfèvres Paris... The Maigret Forum This is not a static website. It changes almost daily. The Maigret " Forum ," an open bulletin board for notices, opinions, information and discussion related to Maigret and Simenon, has become the most active feature of this site. It's where new books, websites, articles and features are first announced and displayed, and includes an indexed archive of the entire past Forum...

back to 1997! Click here for the current Forum. Here's a recent sample - Simenon - Loustal - Maigret 12/7/16  A new edition of Simenon's (non-Maigret) story "Un nouveau dans la ville" has just been issued by Omnibus, illustrated by Loustal, in which Loustal gets equal billing with Simenon on the cover... The story, written at Desert Sands, Tucson, Arizona in 1949, and published the following year, was translated into English by Bernard Lechtman as The Novel of Man, and appeared as a limited edtion in 1964 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 59pp), "a lecture delivered in the Main Auditorium of the Brussels World Fair on October 3, 1958... published as a New Year's greeting to friends of the author & the publisher." Maigret fans are no doubt familiar with Jacques de Loustal's illustrations, which have been reported on these Forum pages a number of times...

The Forum article of May 2, 2003 included links to the 2000 Figaro Magazine article on Loustal's Simenon/Maigret illustrations. In addition to two Yantchevsky Maigret covers, the covers of four Loustal Maigrets appeared in the Sept. 7, 2005 Forum , Maigret et l'inspecteur malgracieux (2002) [ mal ], Le témoinage de l'enfant de choeur (2002) [ cho ], Le client le plus obstiné du monde (2000) [ obs ], and On nu tue pas les pauvres types (2000) [ pau ]. Two other Loustal Maigrets, Ceux du Grand Café [ ceu ] and Menaces de Mort [ men ] were published in 2001, and all six were published in a single volume in 2014, Six enquetes de Maigret. From Oct. 15, 2014 - Feb.

28, 2015 there was a Loustal/Simenon Exhibition at BILIPO in Paris, attended by Jérôme, who reported to the Forum on Oct. 7, 2014 , and sent several of his photos of the exhibition on Oct. 18 . A postage stamp designed by Loustal was issued by France (on my birthday!) in 2013, portraying 36 Quai des Orfèvres, the site of Maigret's office... ST A phenomenal author and his phenomenal character Georges Simenon was by many standards the most successful author of the 20th century, and the character he created, Inspector Jules Maigret, who made him rich and famous, ranks only after Sherlock Holmes as the world's best known fictional detective. There is nothing commonplace about the life of Georges Simenon, and he and his works have been the subject of innumerable books and articles. The Maigret stories are unlike any other detective stories  the crime and the details of unraveling it are often less central to our interest than Maigret's journey through the discovery of the cast of characters... towards an understanding of man.

Simenon said he was obsessed with a search for the "naked man"  man without his cultural protective coloration, and he followed his quest as much in the Maigrets as in his "hard" novels. Although most of Simenon's work is available in English, it was originally written in French. Simenon was born and raised in Belgium, and while Paris was "the city" for him, the home of Maigret, he was 'an international,' a world traveler who moved often and lived for many years in France, the United States, and Switzerland. Because he wrote in French, and for the most part lived in French-speaking countries, most of the books and magazine articles about him were written in French as well. Unlike his own books however, many of these have never been available in translation. Because Simenon lived to be nearly 90, and left a legacy of hundreds of books  from which more than 50 films have been made, along with hundreds of television episodes  there is much to collect, to examine, to display and discuss. This site takes Maigret as its theme, and Simenon as its sub-theme.

There is much here about all aspects of Simenon and Maigret, but not so much about Simenon's other, non-Maigret books. There are full texts of many magazine and journal articles, including many translated into English here, as far as I am aware, for the first time. In this way non-French-speaking Maigret fans can now share, in a time-compressed form, articles about Simenon and Maigret spanning more than 70 years, as well as a forum for discussion and contribution which... Enough. There's a lot here. Enjoy your visit. Come back again, and feel free to contribute to the Forum. Corrections, comments, and suggestions are welcome. Steve Trussel Maigret Maigret Published: Mon 21 Mar 2016 Maigret Sets A Trap features the legendary French fictional detective Jules Maigret, played by the globally-renowned actor Rowan Atkinson.

In the first film, Maigret Sets A Trap, set in 1955 during a sweltering summer in Paris, the city is gripped with fear as four women are murdered on the streets of Monmartre in a spree of seemingly unconnected attacks. Chief Inspector Maigret is under huge public and professional pressure to find the killer before he strikes again. Maigret sets a trap which ultimately leads to a thrilling climax. Further cast include Fiona Shaw (Harry Potter, True Blood), Aiden McCardle (Mr Selfridge, The Mill), Shaun Dingwall (Silent Witness, Death In Paradise), Lucy Cohu (Broadchurch), Leo Starr (Call The Midwife, Lewis), Rufus Wright (Miranda, Doctors), Hugh Simon (The Mill, MI-5), David Dawson (Ripper Street, Peaky Blinders), Colin Mace (Doctors, Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies), Rebecca Night (Starlings) and Eva-Jane Willis (Humans, ChickLit). The formidable character of Jules Maigret first appeared in print in 1931.

Georges Simenon, who wrote 75 Maigret novels, is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century – selling around a billion books worldwide to date. George Grella: Simenon and Maigret Simenon and Maigret George Grella Except perhaps among the stuffy and the effete, there seems no longer any question about the importance of Georges Simenon. Distinguished men of letters, discerning critics, an international reading public, and his own enormous body of work have established Simenon as a major modern novelist. The fact that he has virtually created his own genre  the 'simenon'  and worked powerfully within it is one measure of his unique achievement. Yet for all his individuality, the range of his talents has generated critical comparisons with a pantheon of writers past and present. His depiction of the seamy and the sordid suggests Dickens and Graham Greene. Although he acknowledges the influence of Gogol, his characters seem closer to those of Dostoyevski.

His stylistic precision and economy and his reluctance to play the metaphysician remind one of Hemingway; many critics, however, discover in his works a world view resembling that of Sartre and Camus. The breadth and abundance of his work naturally recall Balzac. And so on. In fact, most of the writers Simenon resembles, no matter how disparate they seem, share a common denominator: they are largely artists of the violent, the cruel, and the criminal. Like Simenon himself, they are practitioners of the thriller, a popular literary form capable of high development. Whatever the scope and significance of his action, Simenon remains primarily a writer of thrillers. The violent nature of human emotion provides his constant subject. He has himself admitted his preoccupation with human beings driven to their limits, which seems to mean in his novels, men and women compelled by passion and circumstance to damage others and themselves. His work deals not with love, fidelity, and virtue, but with lust, betrayal, and vice. His customary milieu is squalid, his people desperate, and his attitude detached, ironic, and mercilessly objective.

Because he does indeed resemble Dickens, Dostoyevski, Greene, and Camus, he finds the criminal of one sort or another an appropriate and even representative man for his age. All men, as Simenon's novels show, may be criminals. The thrillers that have most firmly established Simenon's reputation are his detective stories, the 65 or 70 (depending on whose count one uses) adventures of Inspector Jules Maigret. The Maigret novels occupy a curious position in their author's canon. He has deprecated them as inferior to his other work, and ardent Simenonists occasionally seem embarrassed by them. They are, after all, only detective stories, a necessarily minor kind of fiction, written for the reader's relaxation and entertainment. But one of Simenon's most important achievements is his superior handling of the tired materials of this supposedly second-rate genre. He has contributed significantly to the form, and his detective stories demand as much respect as any of his works. No consideration of the author can disregard the 'Maigrets'. Of course, Simenon applies his own peculiar talents to the detective novel, transforming it from a conventionalized and predictable form into something closely resembling a 'simenon'.

He rejects the intricate problem, the ingenious deductions, and above all, the eccentric, brilliant sleuth of traditional detective fiction. He replaces these elements with his typical setting, atmosphere, characters, and events, all presented in the terse, spare, deceptively simple Simenon style. The Maigret novels lie much closer to the other simenons than to most detective fiction. The vitally important difference between Simenon's detective stories and his other novels is the presence of Inspector Maigret, through whose consciousness everything in the novel is filtered. As famous in his way as Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Maigret lacks virtually every distinguishing mark of the Sherlockian Great Detective. He displays no conspicuous physical or intellectual gifts, speaks no memorable epigrammatic phrases, cherishes no striking personal eccentricities. He is neither a quirky bachelor nor a dazzling original. He is, in fact, a very ordinary man, almost distressingly dull and domestic. Happily married to a devoted and motherly woman, he enjoys no vices beyond pipesmoking and a perhaps larger than ordinary consumption of beer, wine, and spirits.

Perhaps most important, he follows no distinctive method (as he constantly points out), preferring instead to absorb all the knowledge he can, then brood over it until he comes up with the solution to a case. His cases bear little resemblance to most fictional crime. In Simenon there are no bizarre murders with infernal machines, no diabolically clever criminals using advanced scientific methods. Instead, people, driven by the depressingly limited range of human emotions  fear, jealousy, hate, lust  simply kill other people. The murderers and their victims betray the terrifying sameness of crime. They may come from a variety of social classes and situations  the decadent aristocrats of Maigret et les témoins recalcitrants, the solid Dutch citizens of Un Crime en Holland or the Belgian shopkeepers of Chez les Flamands, as well as the tawdry denizens of Montmartre (Maigret au 'Picratts') but they are united in their capacity for sin. Crime in Simenon has a way of becoming endemic, spreading like a stain until every character is implicated, defiled somehow by events.

Like almost all the other Simenon characters, the people in a Maigret novel are invariably stamped with the pathos and defeat the author finds fundamental to the human condition. Unlike the usual detective, Inspector Maigret does not always make things right. No infallible dispenser of justice, he seldom finds it easy to absolve the innocent and punish the guilty. To begin with, for him it is no simple task to assign guilt. A whole family may be implicated in a crime, as in The Flemish Shop or Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses. The murderer may seem less guilty than the apparently innocent as in Les Scrupules de Maigret, where the intended victim turns out to be more vicious than her would-be killers. In Maigret se Trompe, the brilliant physician whom Maigret suspects happens to be innocent of any crime except that of total inhumanity; though Maigret is shocked by Gouin's character, he cannot arrest the man for cruelty and heartlessness. In Maigret en Meublé he even regrets his discovery of guilt  to do his job he must violate his own compassion for an invalid and her devoted lover, who happens also to be a murderer.

As his creator claims, the presence of Inspector Maigret does in part limit the novels. We cannot see fully into the souls of the characters; we can know only what the detective knows. But this does not relegate the Maigret books to an inferior position in the Simenon canon. As we see, Inspector Maigret observes the actions of people who normally inhabit the other Simenon novels. He is also the man commissioned to apprehend them when they violate the law, when their passions drive them beyond the boundaries of normal human values. The Maigret novel begins, so to speak, where the Simenon ends. In the one, terrible forces culminate in an act of violence; in the other, a man studies the completed act of violence in an attempt to recover the passions that caused it. Perhaps, then, the investigations of Inspector Maigret represent a kind of sequel to a simenon. The structure, characters, and events of The Flemish Shop and Chez Krull (the first a Maigret, the second a Simenon), resemble each other so closely, as John Raymond points out in his recently published Simenon in Court, that the complementary relationship of the two kinds of novels seems obvious.

Because of his unique position in Simenon's works and because of the relationships between the Maigret novels and the other simenons, Maigret serves another important function. He provides a form of judgment  not necessarily merciful or just  on the human capacity for wrongdoing that Simenon's fictional world continually implies. Maigret can be seen as a projection of the author's conscience, a control exerted upon whatever extremes evolve out of a richly creative imagination. Maigret's judgments supply a norm which Simenon's other fiction usually lacks. Since the other books never otherwise pass judgment, the Maigret novels may be the logical place to turn in order to discover what the author thinks of the characters and the world he has created. Inspector Maigret's most important function, however, transcends his role as arbiter and suggests a paradoxical connection with the traditional sleuth of detective fiction, whom he otherwise never resembles. He is, like most fictional detectives, an imaginative projection of the artist himself. The conventional detective hero is in part a figure of wish fulfilment, the dream self of a precocious child.

Living in cosy and protected bachelor solitude, tinkering with unusual hobbies, and exploring arcane interests, he enjoys the freedom to do and say exactly what he wishes. Above and beyond the law, the detective solves impossible crimes, frequently only for the purpose of demonstrating his own intellectual superiority. Protected from sexual passion, the detective enjoys the childish oral indulgences of smoking, drinking, eating, and boasting. Such figures as Poe's Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Nero Wolfe all seem to embody their creators' juvenile fantasies. As we know, Inspector Maigret represents no such obvious and primitive wish fulfilment. He lacks most of the requisite traits, particularly the smug intellectual invulnerability, that cloak the Great Detective. Maigret never gloats over his successes because they are so seldom real victories. His famous 'method' defines his peculiar virtues as a detective and separates him sharply from the traditional sleuth. His method differs utterly from the fusion of keen observation, wide knowledge, and rigorous reasoning by which fictional sleuths solve crime. A professional with all the techniques of a formidable investigative machinery at his disposal, Maigret prefers to play a lone hand.

Despite the reports, autopsies, dossiers, and other data he receives, facts bore him. Neither a methodical sifter of evidence nor a careful logician, Maigret relies on a sure knowledge of human character and an intuitive sympathy. He unites these abilities in his technique of absorption, soaking up all details and impressions, no matter how irrelevant, in order to pursue his investigations. He tries to sense the 'feel' of a particular case, 'sniffing up' the 'private lives of other people' (Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses). But if Maigret is a sponge, he is also a chameleon: he not only absorbs and assimilates, he is himself absorbed and assimilated, employing his very commonplaceness to enter fully into the case at hand. Maigret succeeds in his investigations precisely because he lacks those distinctive qualities of the Great Detective. Because his personality is in no way remarkable, he can blend almost unnoticeably into his surroundings. Decidedly not an original, devoid of strikingly unusual mannerisms, Maigret, as his name implies, has only the barest outline, a meagre sketch, of a personality.

No aspect of his own character, therefore, intrudes between him and his work. Thus even in unfamiliar territory, ignorant of the language as in The Flemish Shop or of the customs as in Mon Ami Maigret, he accomplishes his object as well as in the familiar ground of Paris (Maigret in Montmartre). One of the books that best demonstrates his special abilities is Maigret Takes a Room, where the Inspector rents a room in a boarding house to find a murderer. He is wholly assimilated into the neighbourhood, becoming, in effect, a character in his own case. The end of the investigation brings its usual spiritual fatigue and sadness, caused by the wrench Maigret must undergo when he returns to his old character of policeman. This method, as he always claims, is no method at all, and of course he is correct; or rather, it is no method for a detective, professional or amateur, real or fictional. But Maigret is not really a detective and he is more than a kind of moral censor for the author. He is, in fact, the artist himself.

The Maigret novels provide, not an exercise in entertaining crime fiction, but a continuing portrait of the artist as detective and the detective as artist. Since Simenon himself seems obsessed with the creative act, it should come as no surprise that he chooses a typically Simenonesque genre to dramatize the process of creation. Because he also employs the detective as a surrogate for himself, Simenon demonstrates one major point of comparison with the writers of traditional detective fiction, who project their fantasies on the character of the detective. Most detective heroes, after all, may serve as artist figures. The detective, like the artist, is essentially an observer. Unlike most detectives, however, Maigret is not fascinated so much by particular facts or events as by the truth that lies behind them. He is not so much concerned with 'whodunit' as with the motives, the passions, the pressures, which drive men to commit murder. For him the investigation is its own goal, the capture of the criminal only an anticlimax. He must, like the artist, find his greatest satisfaction in the creative endeavour, in the dissolution of his personality in the lives of others.

The end of a case means he must return to himself, relinquishing his art for the details of life, always a rather depressing diminuendo. Like all detectives and all artists, Maigret must be a reconstructionist. He enters a situation only after its central action has already occurred. Presented with the sparse details of unfamiliar lives, he goes about the business of deciding what is relevant and what not, which fact leads to which truth, and who among a group of diverse personalities has been driven to commit destruction. He penetrates a tangle of actions and emotions to establish order, to find causality, pattern, and meaning. His investigation therefore properly ignores most of the apparently important points and concentrates instead on what may seem a host of irrelevancies  a character's preferences in food and drink, his habits, his sexual life, the way he conducts his business, his past, and so forth. Whatever the need for official and artistic objectivity, Maigret cannot help being drawn into the lives he examines. The details he discovers brings a special sense of life to the people he meets. And he realizes that 'from understanding people he derived not merely a feeling of pity, but also a kind of affection' (Maigret's Mistake).

Seldom unmoved by his discoveries, he frequently acknowledges that his job demands a certain payment in the currency of the spirit. In Maigret Takes a Room, his compassion for the long and hopeless love between an invalid and a criminal instructs him once again in the sacrifice and sadness his profession demands. Hating himself, he must arrest the man. His task, as Simenon has described the profession of writing, is a 'vocation of unhappiness'. Like the artist, then, Inspector Maigret does not so much create as recreate, shaping out of the materials of human disaster a pattern of meaning and truth. His ultimate function, as he realizes in La Première Enquête de Maigret, differs markedly from that of most detectives. To tell the truth, the profession he had always wanted to practice did not exist . . . he used to imagine a very intelligent man, above all a very understanding man, doctor and priest at once, as it were, a man who would at first glance understand the destinies of others .... People would have come to consult this man just as they consulted a doctor. In a manner of speaking he would have been a repairer of destinies. Not only because he was intelligent.

Maybe he wouldn't have needed to be exceptionally intelligent? But because he was able to live the lives of every sort of man, to put himself inside everybody's mind. Maigret here seems to echo closely the constant credo of his creator, who sees the artist as a being capable of living the lives of other men, who like Maigret must get inside the skins of other human beings. Apparently, too, Simenon sees the effects of his actions as ennobling. In order to create the artist must enter into other human lives; his creation, then, shows the product of that assimilative technique. The whole process subsequently instructs the reader, enabling him to repair his destiny and seek a better life. The detective-artist can counsel men, arrange their lives, mend their destinies. Teacher, doctor, priest, the detective-artist should be a wise and compassionate being, shaping goodness and redemption out of evil, misfortune, and sorrow. Although Maigret may not resemble his fictional cousins in many ways, his role as a type of the artist allies him with the sleuths of the past. All fictional detectives seem to embody something of the artist.

Gifted beings who live in splendid isolation, they are distinguished from other men by their talents and achievements. Their strange habits and idiosyncrasies are tolerated as emblems of their abilities. They apply their gifts of observation, memory, and intelligence to reconstruct truth out of fact. They can even punish the guilty and absolve the innocent. Thus, even beyond the obvious wish fulfilment, the detective can represent the fantasies of his creator; the fantasy may sometimes seem immature and silly, but it has enchanted generations. Anyone who can give satisfaction by sharing his dream with others deserves a measure of respect and admiration, whatever the nature of that dream. Of course, Simenon steadfastly refuses to glamorize the hero who embodies his own fantasies. Like everyone else in Simenon, Maigret simply exists. As a detective and as an artist, he possesses no spectacular qualities. His success results from his ordinariness, which suggests the absolute humility of his creator, who approaches his subjects with the honesty and purity of a writer fully committed to his vision. Maigret and Simenon share a great gift: each can subordinate himself entirely in order to discover the essence of others.

Like Keats, Simenon demonstrates the necessity of dissolving the self to apprehend the truth and beauty of the object. The Maigret novels, then, deserve an important place in the Simenon canon. They are admirably drawn dramas of murder, typically Simenonesque treatments of crime, which seems to be a constant and revelatory human action. They help to prove Raymond Chandler's statement that 'the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation'. They also suggest the possibilities of legal and moral judgment, of normal human conscience, which seldom appear elsewhere in Simenon. The Maigret books suggest, too, that their author may be a great deal more of a metaphysician and a moralist than his works would otherwise imply. Finally, the books provide more clearly than anywhere else (with the possible exception of Le Petit Saint) the artist's picture of himself, the sketchy personage who constantly submits himself to the violence and chaos of life in order to instruct his readers and himself in the directions that human destiny can follow.

To readers of detective stories, to Simenonists, to students of literature, the 'maigrets' serve a variety of compelling functions, all of which combine in their identity as a powerful parable of the creative process. They show the artist coming to grips with life, with art, with himself, and they instruct us thereby in the dignity and humility of a powerful imagination. Maigret’s Jurisdiction - Los Angeles Review of Books Maigret’s Jurisdiction By Elliott Colla FEBRUARY 15, 2015 THESE MIGHT BE Jules Maigret’s best years ever. It is not hard to picture the sardonic hero of Georges Simenon’s best-selling novels smiling down on us from policier heaven. And why wouldn’t he? Contemporary American mass culture is awash with procedurals, and Maigret’s jurisdiction now covers the entire world. Police stories are so ubiquitous today that it is hard to remember back to when detectives tended not to be police. It’s even harder to imagine that the police hero had to be invented in the first place.

But that is more or less what Simenon did back in 1930 when he created the jaded, savvy Maigret, dressed always in an overcoat, his pipe in one hand, a beer in the other, and his wife half-forgotten at home. Seventy-five titles and 80 years later, Maigret’s literary DNA pervades crime fiction from Paris to Hollywood. Maigret’s descendants are by now a motley squad spanning from the 87th Precinct of Ed McBain to the LAPD of Dragnet and James Ellroy. From Ian Rankin’s Rebus to Henning Mankell’s Wallander — from The Wire to CSI, from Dexter to True Detective — the precincts of our imagination are staffed with Maigret’s heirs. Maigret is only now beginning to appear systematically in English, for the first time since his birth in 1930. A new generation of readers will thus discover the magic of the Maigret formula. Of course, “discover” is an odd word to use when talking about Simenon; he was hardly forgotten.

Decades ago, each translation of a Maigret title became a bestseller in the United Kingdom and the United States. Between 1930 and his death in 1989, Simenon wrote more than 200 novels (under various names) and sold over 700 million books. Most of these sales were in the Inspector Maigret series. Only a handful of writers — including Shakespeare and Agatha Christie — have “sold” more than Simenon. But as these English translations fell in and out of print , the name Simenon became little more than a talisman for American audiences. We knew of Simenon, but would be excused for not having read much by him. As Simenon’s massive library began to enter the public domain more than a decade ago, we have lost that excuse. With the 2003 centenary of Simenon’s birth, NYRB Classics commissioned 11 new and revised translations of Simenon’s celebrated romans durs . And now, since 2013, Penguin Books has committed itself to bringing out the 75 books of the Maigret series in an orderly fashion.

All of these numbers had been published before in translations, although most of them only haphazardly and often in odd “omnibus” formats. But now they will be available, for the first time in their entirety, and with smooth new English translations that do credit to the originals’ silky economy of language. Maigret might enjoy this, but Simenon might not. The Belgian author had a vexed relationship with the Maigret series. On the one hand, Maigret made him that rarest of things — a genuinely rich writer. On the other hand, the Maigret series ensured that his literary reputation would forever after be based on market, rather than aesthetic, values. Maybe now critics will give Maigret his due. Maybe all those sprawling crime television series of the last 15 years have taught us that some literary titles are to be treated not as individual, stand-alone works but as fragments of a vaster system of stories and characters, situations and themes.

And now maybe those of us who expect great novelists to write fat novels will grasp what Simenon meant, in The Paris Review, when he responded to everyone who dismissed his work as low-brow: All the critics for twenty years have said the same thing: “It is time for Simenon to give us a big novel, a novel with twenty or thirty characters.” They do not understand. I will never write a big novel. My big novel is the mosaic of all my small novels. You understand? Now that the entire Inspector Maigret series is coming out, we can read Simenon’s small novels as a huge mosaic — and conceivably, in their sum, as one great big novel. Certainly anyone who wants to binge-read Maigret titles will find them to be well worth the pleasure. In them, Simenon shows himself to be a committed stylist as well as an endlessly inventive storyteller. True, the Maigret novels are conventional. For fetishists of the ever new, this in itself is a mortal sin. For the rest of us, however, it need not be: these novels were never meant to be read as wholly original creations, but rather as variations on a pattern.

And in fairness to Simenon, he never repeated himself, and for the most part the pattern he worked with was of his own invention. A glimpse of this originality is on full display in the first 10 Inspector Maigret novels, which Simenon published in a single year — 1931. Already in these first novels, Simenon had developed a unique ability to sketch fine human psychologies with incredible economy. While others might take pages to flesh out a character, Simenon knows how to do so in telegraph form, drawing one man by the stains on an overcoat and a woman by how she buttons her blouse. Similarly, it is remarkable how Simenon captures the sense of place in these novels with only a few words, and always in relation to the interior experience of characters. For instance, in A Crime in Holland, not only is the landscape of a Dutch village revealed in brief, jabbing strokes, but more importantly, so too is their impression on the inspector: The sky was clear, the air of astonishing limpidity. The inspector walked past a timber yard where planks of oak, mahogany and teak were stacked in piles as tall as houses. A boat was moored alongside.

Some children were playing. Then came a kilometre with no outstanding features. Floating tree trunks covered the surface of the canal, all the way. White fences surrounding fields dotted with magnificent cows. Another clash between reality and his preconceived ideas. The word ‘farm’ for Maigret conjured up a thatched roof, a dunghill, a bustle of barnyard fowls. And he found himself facing a fine newly built structure, surrounded by a garden full of flowers. Moored in the canal in front of the house was an elegant mahogany skiff. And propped against the gate, a lady’s bicycle, gleaming with nickel. Here and elsewhere, Simenon sketches the outlines of a world and allows his readers to fill in the blanks. In fact, such blank spaces — “a kilometre with no outstanding features” — are key to Simenon’s style. Together, they signal Simenon’s confidence that his readers were like cinematographers: they needed few stage directions, since the rest of the shoot would take place in their imaginations. Already in these first Maigret novels, Simenon had developed his skill for pacing.

These stories start with a bang and conclude only days and hours after they begin — and yet they never feel rushed. For all these reasons, the Maigret titles read sometimes more like screenplays than novels. It is the character of his detective, Jules Maigret, that stands out most in these stories. Like all great detectives, Maigret has a method. His is remarkable only for its banality — he watches the lives of criminals and victims, without judging or rejecting them, without commenting on them, for those observations allow him to do his job. Maigret regularly steps into the dark underworlds of criminal France — but he never pretends to be more logical, clever, or sophisticated than the people he meets. In this way, the character of Maigret allowed Simenon to offer crime stories that transcend morality and pathology. Indeed, the world of Maigret is not bifurcated into opposing sides, with evil criminals on one team and righteous defenders of justice on the other. In Maigret, neither the criminals nor the cops are particularly eccentric or unusual — they both belong to society and live in society.

Much as Émile Zola had methodically explored the central problems of modernity (urbanization, industrialization, class conflict, immigration) as they played out in the key sites and institutions of modern society, the Maigret series presents a similar sociological aspiration, albeit without the detail or scope of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series. And yet the character of Maigret allows Simenon to explore these issues with a more objective sociology than Zola’s. ¤ Before Maigret, detective fiction was not particularly sociological. The giants of the genre — Doyle, Christie, Chesterton, and Sayers — were too caught up in the fantasies of a triumphant capitalist class to be much interested in other social realities. Their detectives — Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Father Brown, and Lord Peter Wimsey — were content with playing genteel logic games in drawing rooms and restoring property to owners. Simenon had more in common with the hard-boiled authors of his time — Hammett, Chandler, and even Woolrich — who punched the genre in the gut and tossed it into the street.

Sleuths like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe poked around back alleys, broken homes, and in other places where society’s rougher edges showed. When these dicks entered the drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie, it was often through a broken window, and what they discovered there was that property was the real crime. But as sociological as these hard-boiled writers could be, they never attempted to be systematic. Simenon’s Maigret, however, combined the street smarts and gut intuition of noir antiheroes with the method and consistency of the effete detective. In doing so, Simenon paved the way for detective fiction to become the most sociological of genres. But there is another wholly original aspect to Maigret’s character — he was a cop. Until Simenon, the heroes of detective fiction operated outside (and often against) official police agencies. The classical detective — like the private eye — was motivated by a private or personal rather than public sense of justice and law. For Holmes — as for Marlowe — the game would likely put you in conflict with the police. Cops, when they appear, are usually flat-footed buffoons who can never catch up to the detective.

Maigret might appear flat-footed and less than clever, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a great detective. The implications of making his protagonist an inspector with the police judiciaire go far beyond the matter of character, however. They effectively change the story of crime itself. By making this choice, Simenon added an original and endlessly productive dimension to detective fiction, that of jurisdiction. As ubiquitous as the concept is now, we should remember that it implies three important things: 1.) a legal authority rooted in public institutions; 2.) a system of routine fact-finding procedures; and 3.) a power that is always delimited geographically. These features give the Maigret series much of its dynamism, linking character, plot, and location in tight organic patterns. For instance, Maigret’s authority and likability as a character stem from the fact that he works in a state office. In doing so, Simenon effectively reconceptualized crime as a legal issue. He bucked the essentially conservative tendency of detective fiction, which, according to Ernest Mandel , was to tell stories about the ruling class and the various threats posed to its property, and allowed the genre to move beyond the limits of bourgeois morality.

Maigret is, in the end, a bureaucrat, working within a complex institution whose values are professional rather than moral or merely class-based. And his character strengths mirror the demands of his job: his ability to talk to criminals — to empathize with and inhabit their reasoning — is indispensable to his work as a detective, as is his ability to blend in — as a sort of citoyen everyman — into whatever social landscape he enters. Similarly, the plot unfolds always in relation to a procedural system of investigation, and an administrative system that allocates information and resources to the forensic investigator. Maigret’s brilliance lies not in his individual talent, but rather in his commitment to seeing routine procedures through to their conclusion. This, again, is in complete contrast to the eccentric sleuths of the classical mystery: it is hard to imagine Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey holding down any job. After Maigret, we come to expect the drama of doing routine work to be a central part of the detective’s story. ¤ However, it is the other sense of jurisdiction — as specific terrain of authority — that sets Maigret’s stories apart from what came before.

Simenon chose for Maigret to be assigned to the “flying squad” of the police judiciaire — the central office, in Paris, of the Police Nationale. (The closest analogue in the United States would be the FBI.) This puts Maigret at odds with the dynamics of most contemporary police stories, in which the geographic and administrative limitations of jurisdiction become a central part of the story — and in which it matters that a police investigator, unlike a private eye, cannot go anywhere to investigate anything. In the Maigret novels, the detective has an apparently limitless jurisdiction. He is less often found rambling through Paris than across the surrounding districts and departments of Île-de-France, and beyond, to Belgium, Holland, and Germany. Maigret crosses borders and jurisdictions often and with surprising ease, encountering problems of translation between national languages and conversion between national currencies. The geographical dimension of these novels is well worth pondering, since they offer a glimpse of a Europe that was already quite integrated, albeit unevenly, decades before the EU was even a dream. All the early Maigret novels are characterized by an unusual attention to the dangers and opportunities of movement and connection.

The emergence of massive transportation and communication networks are the central plot fact in all the stories — and in order to track crime, Maigret has to navigate a web of international train routes (The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, The Late Monsieur Gallet), canal systems (The Carter of ‘La Providence’, A Crime in Holland), sea lanes (The Yellow Dog, The Grand Banks Café), telegraph and telephone systems, and, eventually, interurban roads (Night at the Crossroads). If Maigret is not in a train station or port or roadside bar, he is probably en route to one. By mapping out the emergent networks of French modernity as a sprawling social geography, Simenon turned crime writing toward serious sociological reflection. Take, for instance, the enigmatic opening lines of Pietr the Latvian: “ICPC to PJ Paris Xvzust Krakow vimontra m ghks triv psot uv Pietr-le-Letton Bremen vs tyz btolem.” Maigret translates the phrase, which, we learn, is composed in the language of a continental network of police agencies.

Rendered legible, the words read: “International Criminal Police Commission to Police Judiciaire in Paris: Krakow police report sighting Pietr the Latvian en route to Bremen.” The next memo reads: “Polizei-Präsidium Bremen to PJ Paris: Pietr the Latvian reported en route Amsterdam and Brussels.” These memos and others sketch a colorful map of overlapping networks: a rail that could take a Latvian national through Poland and Germany, then Holland and Belgium and on to France; a police network linking the national polices of these various countries in a single system of knowledge and surveillance; and, of course, a communication network linking these two systems — rail and policing — to one another in real-time. The rest of the novel fills out this geography, and indicates just how exhilarating and terrifying it was for Simenon to witness the emergence of this interwar landscape where polyglot nations intersected and interpenetrated each other by way of crime and interdiction. Bodies, goods, and information travel back and forth across borders with near infinite possibilities. This movement is what makes crime possible, by allowing men to leave their pasts behind or to inhabit more than one identity at a time.

These networks give rise to the particular forms of crime that Maigret is called to investigate, most of which revolve around smuggling rings and the possibility of identity theft as criminal gangs master the capacities, gaps, and loopholes made possible by a networked Europe. It is on this point we can begin to appreciate why the vagabond, the itinerant worker, and the immigrant industrial laborer — and, in Simenon’s anti-Semitic moments, the non-national character of the Jew — appear so often in the Maigret stories as markers of danger and depravity. What hangs in the balance, of course, is social order. And in the case of Maigret, it is a wholly reactionary sense of order, premised on a desire to undo the crimes and damages unleashed upon Europe by the emergence of these modern networks, a desire for nationals — citizens, languages, and currencies — to remain on their proper sides of the borders and within their jurisdictions. In weighing the expansive description of society in the Maigret series against its reactionary surface politics, we would do well to remember a basic point made by the Marxist critic Georg Lukács in his seminal studies of European realism.

For Lukács, the political message of a novel was not to be found in its explicit slogans or character sympathies, but rather in its relation to the concept of totality. Lukács probably never deigned to read the Maigret series. But if he had, he would have discovered that despite their reactionary surface character, they produced the kind of literary vision he demanded of the novel form. That vision involved imagining society not in parts but as a single totality, with all of its conflicts and contradictions. Besides Simenon, few crime writers — perhaps only George Pelecanos, David Peace, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II in the contemporary period — have attempted to describe social totality in the sense that Lukács meant. It is this attention to the totalized aspect of modern European societies that makes the Maigret series as timely as ever. ¤

Question: What was the forename of the fictional detective, 'Inspector Maigret'.
Answer: JULES